Professor David Shambaugh’s recent essay in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that China’s political system is about to hit some very rough times (“The Coming Chinese Crackup“) has provoked intense debate. Peter Harcher’s article written in response offers a neat summary of what makes Shamgaugh’s conclusions so debatable.

I nevertheless absolutely reject his conclusion which I find astonishingly ill-informed. The pervasive sense of dramatic change is, I have found, combined in almost all Chinese minds with satisfaction and confidence that the change is urgently needed–indeed long overdue—and in the right direction.

It also demonstrates that the American academy has powerful competition as a source of cogent analysis on Chinese politics.

Any serious discussion of China’s future must include non-Academics like economist Arthur Kroeber and Australians like Geremie Barmé of the Australian National University and David Kelly of China Policy in Beijing.

Barmé, for his part, writes off Shambaugh’s collapsism as the view of an American deeply anxious about America. Kroeber, an American himself, argues that the Party remains as strong and adaptable as it was in 2008, when Shambaugh wrote his excellent China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation.

My problem with both sides is the determinism implicit in the arguments. The Party’s collapse might not be imminent, but neither is its adaptability without real limits, imposed upon it by important groups and individuals within its own ranks. I find it hard to believe that Barmé and Kroeber would argue that point.

We thus must agree that there may be circumstances under which the Party might prove insufficiently adaptable to avert an existential crisis. And before you protest, let us agree that there may be circumstances under which any polity, however strong and adaptable, might face the same limits. In that case, the answer is neither “the Party will collapse” nor “the Party is too adaptable to collapse.” It is, rather “under what circumstances would the Party face the danger of collapse?”

Like most of us, neither I nor my clients can afford to treat China like its future is a game of roulette: bet on Red, the Party stays in power. Bet on black, and it collapses. Creating strategy in business means contending with all possibilities, balancing them, and coming up with a pathway that appropriately addresses them.

We can be neither Cassandra nor Polyanna. We should not overestimate the considerable challenges Xi Jinping faces as he guides the nation through roiling and uncharted waters, but none of us can afford to underestimate them.

This is more of a practical paper than my last one, giving a quick overview of the uneven success enjoyed by fast food companies in China, and offering a series of prescriptions designed to avoid some of the more serious rocks and shoals, and mitigate the effects of many others.

America fights, in other words, while China does business, and not only in Afghanistan. In Iraq, where U.S. troops brought down a dictator and are still fighting an insurgency, Chinese oil companies have acquired bigger stakes in the oil business than their American counterparts. In Pakistan, where billions in U.S. military aid helps the government keep the Taliban at bay, China has set up a free-trade area and is investing heavily in energy and ports.

This was a clever observation when Anne Applebaum first made it five years ago, and there is still some validity to it. Nonetheless, one cannot help but wonder if things will stay this way much longer. China’s military posture overseas continues to rise, and its companies are beginning to discover that the easy fruit has fallen. We may well have witnessed either the high point of China’s overseas expansion, or, more likely, the end of China’s purely commercial overseas expansion strategy.

Over the last couple of weeks, several people have asked me what the changeover in the Communist Party leadership will mean for international business in China. The short answer is that if I knew, I’d be wealthy. The longer answer is a bit more helpful.

Many years ago I had a mentor and boss who taught me that the parade of personalities and the flow of policies were fun to watch, but that sticking your finger up to feel the political winds would never offer the insight a business requires to make decisions beyond a six month threshold. What you need to understand, she told me, were the fundamental drivers of policy, not the policies themselves.

By fundamental drivers she meant the five or six issues that the nation’s leaders worried about the most, overlaid with the three core goals of the party at any given time. Add to that a general understanding of the climate in the country, and any relatively educated person could at least have a general hunch about a company’s horizons.

For example, I believe the thee core goals of the Party are:

The continuance of Party rule

The social stability of the nation

China’s rise to global economic and political leadership

No rocket science there. Beyond this, though, things get tricker. What are the five things the members of the Politburo Standing Committee worry about when they wakes up at four o’clock in the morning?

Here is my list of the top five.

Controlling corruption without blackening the entire Party in the process

Getting the economy stabilized and on track for continuing growth

Keeping the PLA in line while retaining its political support

Cleaning up the environment without disrupting the economy

Keeping expressions of popular discontent from coalescing into a coherent anti-party front.

These are certainly open for debate, but what all of this suggests is that global companies will be welcome in China to the extent that they address (i.e., demonstrably take into account) these five priorities. What is more, given that domestic attitudes about foreign investment in China have, in the past five years, gone from “generally positive” to “generally ambivalent,” companies are going to find themselves compelled to make a case to their local stakeholders that they have something unique to offer just by being here.

Mind you, I’m not necessarily talking about approvals to do business, although that is an issue. Instead what I mean is that with every audience, from regulators to consumers, every business would do well to remember that being foreign no longer buys you much, and that in the current environment there is no particular priority placed on letting foreign firms into China.

In short, the outlook is not exceptionally good in the near term, but there is as yet little cause to be pessimistic. All of us need to stay tuned.